The long wait is over for console gamers who have been enviously avoiding their PC playing friends who have had a long time to enjoy the newest instalment of Tamriel, or Elder Scrolls games, The Elder Scrolls Online: Tamriel Unlimited.

 

Set a few hundred years before its predecessors Morrowind, Oblivion and Skyrim, Tamriel Unlimited is, seemingly, as the game suggests, unlimited. Once again set in the iconic land of Tamriel, however, this time it is not limited to a specific area. As soon as the map opens up familiar gamers will recognise a lot of place names, such as Riften and Cyrodil that are accessible throughout the game, while other areas will become available through additional content.

 

The story for the game sets out pretty much as all things do in Tamriel. You, the protagonist are in some form of prison, with little information as to how you got there, or why. Upon exiting your cell, you find that you are, in fact, soulless as you have been sacrificed to the Deadric prince, Molag Bol. So that’s new! Taking hand to axe you soon escape your prison. It is at this point that the map seems to explode in front of you as you enter the first (main) area of the game, Stonefalls. It is here that you will spend the vast majority of your time until you are big/tough enough to venture forth into the world.

 

Following two main story arcs and what feels like millions of side plots, you will be questing to regain your sacrificed soul; as well as battling two other factions/alliances for ultimate power in Tamriel mostly through player vs player (PVP) battles and a little bit of story based questing.

 

As well as the normal story, the PVP and multitudes of side quests there is also plenty to explore in Tamriel and a lot of group activities to take part in, such as venturing into a dangerous cave, or taking on a large, or large groups of enemies. You are able to complete of the quests, including the story quests, in a group, however, the story quests seemed to be geared more toward the solo player, so they tend to be a little easy when there is more than a couple of you trying to complete them.

 

The game offers two perspectives of gaming both first and third person to suit your fancy, and you now have mounts too, which is becoming more and more popular in Massively Multiplayer Online (MMO) games. This certainly helps to move around the map rapidly. There is also a fast travel system in which you can travel between wayshrines, or to anybody in your group for free. However, moving to a wayshrine when you are not currently sitting on one will cost you varying amounts of (in-game) money so be careful when selecting this option.

 

All of the elements that you will be familiar with from previous games are present, such as trading, crafting, alchemy and blacksmithing. This keeps the same feel to the game that we have all fallen in love with, but at the same time makes the game feel a little “samey” until you reach the higher levels and can start sinking your teeth into the group activities. As a suggestion, I would consider levels 1 through 10 to be your introduction to the game. This means seem like a lot, however, there is a lot to do and grasp in the game. Players also increase their passive and active abilities very much the same way as you always have, which is by using the skill. So by using a huge two handed battle-axe of skull crushing death while wearing dragon bone heavy armour, you will increase your skills in “two-handed weapons” and “heavy armour” and so on.

 

A lot of the old races are back too; however, their reliance on both magic abilities and skills with weapons seems to be a little more balanced than it has been. So a Dark Elf, who has typically been heavily dependent on magic to hid themselves and sneak up on their enemies, now as a higher reliance on their armour and weapon skills, and the Nord who are typically a brute force instrument of war, are more dependent on their magic skills, granted, their magic is very offensive based, but still, it forces those gamers who have played in a certain way before, to take firm hold of both elements at the same time.

 

There have been a few teething problems since the game launched, such as the extremely large “launch day” update that the game required. This update took a long time to install on relatively quick internet connections, and was averaging around 4 hours just to install them game. Having waited that long for the game to install, the game lost a little of its “wow” factor once we started playing. In addition to this, there have been a few bugs and glitches, with NPC’s (non-playable characters) randomly becoming invisible so that you can’t interact with them, the camera jerking between first and third person view, and a few other glitches. None of them appear to “kill” your game, but some do require a game or even console restart, which is frustrating, particularly when you’re playing in a group.

 

The connection seems fairly stable once you are in and playing and its fairly quick to jump in and out of groups which is a positive, however, some loading screens have a tendency to be soooo long due to what appears to be an underestimated server load, that the load screen times out, forcing a restart of the game. These have happened, but not often enough to drop the game from a five star rating.

 

The game developers have redeemed this fault a little, by removing the need of a subscription to play. Don’t get me wrong, there are still a few things that you can buy on top of the game with your actual cash; however, you won’t have to pay a subscription on top of the game price, in order to play and complete the game.

 

In summary, the game as a whole is as epic as we were expecting, it will keep all kinds of players intrigued for long periods of time whether flying solo, or scavenging as a group. However, the glitches and teething problems might have been overlooked, had the console version not been knocked back months and months for production, based on the poor experience of the PC launch. So as they developers kept us waiting for a game that then took four hours to installed, to not be initially “wow’d” and have had to restart the console a few times, we think that they can handle a drop to 4 stars, for an otherwise faultless, and beautifully crafted and well written game.